LSI CTO touts promise of flash, open source

SAN JOSE, Calif. – The storage industry has just started to harvest opportunities in non-volatile memory and open source. Those were just two observations during a wide-ranging interview with Greg Huff, chief technology officer at LSI Corp.

Facebook’s Open Compute Project (OCP) and the Open Networking Foundation are defining open source projects around computing and networking, respectively. In addition, OpenStack and others are creating open source code for cloud computing.

"Nobody has chosen to do for storage what Facebook has done for servers with their Open Compute initiative," Huff said.

OCP defines an open hardware rack that includes storage but “what will be a future need is physical and logical management, including storage management,” said Wayne M. Adams, Chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association that also is developing an open source version of its Cloud Data Management Interface for Openstack.

But Adams was skeptical about a broader opportunity. "There is no major significant gap in the industry for storage functionality whereby a new open source project needs to be launched," he said.

LSI's Greg Huff is bullish about the prospects for flash and open source storage.

Meanwhile, vendors are rushing headlong to plug flash memory into computers and network storage devices of all descriptions to deliver performance boosts and reap big profits. LSI is riding high on this trend with its recently acquired Sandforce flash controllers as well as flash cards for ultrabooks and combo RAID/flash cards for servers.